Posts Tagged ‘Bossa Studios’

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Bossa Studios, the folks behind Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread, have cancelled their latest game after it failed to draw enough players during a free open beta. Decksplash was a multiplayer game blending the skateboard stunts of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with the ground-painting territory control battles of Splatoon. Were enough people in such a game to make it worth finishing? Bossa hoped to find out my inviting everyone to play for a week, setting a target of reaching 100,000 players. If they hit it, they’d launch Decksplash into early access. If not, they’d cancel it. It did not, and they have cancelled it. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s never been a better time to play video games – wherever you look, you’re spoilt for choice across almost every genre – but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s a dangerous time to be making them. Studio closures are announced with worrying regularity at the moment and countless talented developers struggling to break even.

Bossa Studios (of Surgeon Simulator and I Am Toast fumblecore fame) are hedging their bets, and the fate of their upcoming weird competitive multiplayer skateboarding-thing, Decksplash, hangs in the balance. If the game – seemingly Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater mashed up with Splatoon’s turf-control-through-paint element – hits 100k total players during a free trial lasting until the 10th, it launches as a paid early access game. If it falls short, they cancel it.

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Chet Faliszek, the former Valve Software writer who done them jokes and other words real good for games including the Portals and Left 4s Dead, has joined Bossa Studios. The game he’s joined to work on is cloaked in mystery and shrouded in secrecy for now, but Faliszek does describe it as a cooperative action game that is “trying to do something new in the narrative space using AI”. Bossa are the English mob behind such games as Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, and Worlds Adrift. Read the rest of this entry »

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Bring out your ears, it’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Adam has returned from Gamelab in Barcelona and is ready to tell us all the hot goss about Arkane’s president leaving the studio (there’s not much) but also all the gamescience he acquired from RiME developer Raúl Rubio and Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith. In the mean time, Brendan has been falling off airships and getting into disagreements with cloud hobos in floating island MMO Worlds Adrift, and Pip has been too busy to play things. The world is an accursed slum of injustice.

But there’s more! We also have a tougher-than-normal edition of our patch notes quiz, Patch Adam, and take some questions from readers. Listen now, your attention is our sustenance. Feed us. Feed us.

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Every week we launch Brendan into the early access stratosphere to see if he can find gems among the clouds. This time, the floating islands and airship building of sandbox MMO Worlds Adrift [official site]

I fell off my sky boat. I’m now falling through the clouds wondering if this world has a bottom – a large lava pit or possibly a vast, endless ocean – and also: how long will it take to arrive there? I say “fell”. In fact, I was forcefully ejected from my ship – the Flabbergaster – by some kind of violent spasm of the game’s inner workings. This isn’t the first time I’ve died to a janky accident of the overzealous physics engine, nor is it the most embarrassing. That honour is reserved for the time I crafted a plank of wood and it landed awkwardly on my own head. It might be difficult to describe the merits of this crafting-heavy multiplayer world while the wind rushes so mercilessly around me but I’ll try, because it has many, despite the jank.Read the rest of this entry »

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On one screen, a developer is demonstrating Worlds Adrift [official site], and explaining that players have hand-crafted everything I can see. The game world is made up of floating islands and the one he’s scrambling around right now, using a grappling hook to traverse rapidly, has a ruined building at its centre. It’s not very large, the island. You could hop, skip, grapple and jump across it in a matter of seconds, and it’s hanging in empty space. Well, almost.

As the developer plays, an airship putters into view. He decides to board the ship, even though it’s a good distance away from the island, and then there’s a strange moment when I notice the next screen along in the row of demo pods. A passerby has picked up the controller there and is steering a large airship past an island. Our island. I watch, one eye on each screen, as the two worlds come close to colliding.

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Splatoon is perhaps the most pleasant surprise from Nintendo in years, a charming and inventive multiplayer shooter (of all things!). Squidkids slip and swim around levels, gushing ink to splat each other and win by painting levels their team’s colour, and it’s all just smashing. Obviously, it’s not coming to PC. But, er, Decksplash [official site] is.

Surgeon Simulator developers Bossa Studios yesterday announced Decksplash, a splatfest of their own. It’s a third-person splatter where players paint levels by pulling wikkid sikk skateboard tricks, which seems a curious and charmless combination of ideas. Hmm! Observe: Read the rest of this entry »

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Worlds Adrift [official site] is an upcoming crafting- and exploration-centric MMO from Surgeon Simulator folk Bossa Studios, set in a vast world split into countless floating islands that are navigated by grappling hooks and player-built skyships. I went to see and play it earlier this week.

I’m repeating a line given as part of a game demonstration here, but I do so because it resonated. Most MMOs now are, and long have been, defined by numbers more than by experiences, by the pursuit of minor or major statistical improvements rather than the discovery of new places and new challenges. Worlds Adrift hopes to take us back to the land that time and numbers forgot.Read the rest of this entry »

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Eleven developers, including familiar names like The Creative Assembly and Rovio, have teamed up with War Child to help raise money for children in areas of conflict. The bundle includes 12 unique games for £9.99/$14.99 and all proceeds go to the charity. It’s an excellent chance to do good while playing some fine games.

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When I first saw the trailer for the new Surgeon Simulator DLC [official site] I felt a bit queasy. You can watch the trailer below before reading on and, like me, you may end up thinking that Inside Donald Trump is about deciding whether or not you’d kill the possible president if he were lying unconscious before you. Maybe I played too many of those horrid little celebrity torture simulators that used to pop up on Newgrounds back in the day. Turns out, the DLC is actually about deciding whether to give Trump a heart of stone or a heart of gold.

Presumably, you can just pull his guts out though and maybe replace them with silly string?

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The twin fads of zany physics-based games and Joke Simulator Game Simulator 2013 have mostly passed us by now, so I wonder what’ll be the not oh-so-random joke genre to strike it big? Frag montage parody FPSs have been too small for too long to take off, and Sanic Hegehog games have never been fun enough. Maybe I’m out of touch.

Well, while we await the next big thing in zaniness, we can return to two giants in the field, who are slowly raising themselves from their meme-shaped thrones (resembling the severed head of Richard Dawkins frozen in eternal fury). You see, Goat Simulator [official site] and I Am Bread [official site] are teaming up for crossover free DLC.

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Worlds Adrift [official site] is a game I primarily knew as “the thing with skyships and grappling hooks”. There’s a new trailer, though and it has bits and bobs of gameplay footage in amongst the sweeping camera shots of clouds and floating islands. I’ve also had a little look at the lore of the game so here’s what I now know:

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Your Morning Mate, they call it. Johnny Foamguts. Hedgehog Hell. Cleopatra’s Sponge. Whatever you call bread – Jam’s Friend, Billy. The Sticky Trick – you can now become bread – A Touch of the Brown. Grainbrick – proper real fully-baked bread – Hollywood’s Trickshot – as I Am Bread [official site] has left the Early Access oven to sit on the shelves with the rest of Botham’s Bane.

It’s another difficult-to-control wacky physics game from Surgeon Simulator 2013 developers Bossa, this time starring a floppy slice of bread that’s exploring levels on a mission to accrue exotic new toppings and become tastier.

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Two new game modes have been added to Bossa Studios’ hyper-realistic staple food simulator I Am Bread [official site]: Zero G, which takes our plucky sliced hero into the final frontier, and Bagel Race, which stars an all-new fresh baked good.

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Bossa Studios have released a short sample of gameplay footage for their multiplayer work-in-progress, Worlds Adrift [official site].

The idea behind Worlds Adrift is that you’re an explorer roaming from island to island in your rag bag of an airship, looking for ways to upgrade it and keep it fueled as you wander round the skies. According to Bossa:

“We hope Worlds Adrift will be a return of sorts to the roots of online multiplayer games. We want it to be a freeform exploration and adventure game where players create their own objectives, because we believe those are consistently the most rewarding and empowering goals to attain”

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In the wake of Kickstarter and its crowd funding brethren, the last couple of years has seen a trend of asking communities to give feedback during development, and even to contribute ideas. But a phrase I haven’t heard a lot during all this is, “is it worth us continuing working on this game or not?” That’s the bold question being asked by Surgeon Sim creators Bossa Studios of their new project, Worlds Adrift. You can see the grapple-hooked, ship-building shared world in very early action below.

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I’m sure your emoji are nice and all, but what’d really enrich my written communication is sound effects. Take this post: what I have to do is explain that the company behind Surgeon Simulator yesterday released onto Steam Early Access I Am Bread, a zany physics sandbox where you control a sentient slice of bread roaming a house trying to become tastier. And how am I to do that without all the wacky cartoon bongs, boings, bings, pings, pops, plops, twangs, gongs, horns, and slide whistles that such a post demands? Tch. I guess we’ll find out.

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It’s important to be precise in game names. You wouldn’t want to confuse Deep Dungeons of Doom with the Shallow Dungeons of Doom, which I believe is a local Glaswegian duck-feeding pond. Nor with the Deep Dungeons of Joy which is a family-friendly burger joint in London with a great view of the Jubilee line, or the common phrase “deep pockets of doom” mostly attributed to the sort of people who go on The Apprentice. No, these are Deep, as in arranged as a series of rooms in a vertical fashion; Dungeons, adventuring places; of Doom, where you’re likely to meet your end. They’re also rather fun.

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I Am Bread’s trailer trundled onto the internet in a miniature clown car, putt-putting toward the big top of YouTube, coughing smoke rings from its tiny exhaust pipe. How the crowds guffawed when the doors clattered to the ground and a lanky harlequin struggled out of the driver’s seat, his oversized shoes flip-flopping against the steering wheel and sending gasping honks out into the atmosphere. And tears streamed down the cheeks of every man, woman and child as they collapsed in hysterics when the passengers spilled out onto the sawdust scattered across the floor. THEY WERE SLICES OF BREAD! THE PASSENGERS WERE SLICES OF BREAD!

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I couldn’t tell you how many eyeballs I’ve gouged out and teeth I’ve kicked in while playing video games. Lots, certainly (and in the game), but never to help people. New Surgeon Simulator DLC will let us altruistically enjoy sounds of eyeballs squishing and teeth tinkling, adding new operations starring those bodyparts. It’s bringing them over from the PlayStation 4 version, really, along with new environments like a bed smashing through the doors of a hospital hallway. Curiously, a graphics overhaul is also packaged into this £1.99 DLC, not coming as an upgrade for everyone.